Parties,ideology and elections: the politics of federal revenues and expenditures forecasting

Some scholars view problems in the accuracy of federal fiscal forecasts as being largely technical in nature .Others intimate that there may be a political component as well. This paper exlpores the relative merits of these two perspectives finding some support for each. Executive forecasts were found to be random with respect to direction of errors , error magnitudes increased in absolute terms over time , and revenues estimate error s tended to cluster in short bursts. Executive forecasting errors were also linked to presidential party , ideology and year in the election cycle.     

Security Implications of Japan's Information Gathering Satellite (IGS) System

Countries which previously limited their space activity to civilian purposes have increasingly come to employ dual-use technology as a first step into the world of military space. Japan's Information Gathering Satellite (IGS) system, intended to support disaster relief situations, and provide information for diplomatic and defense policy decision-making, is exemplary of this trend. Not coincidentally, the program was approved shortly after the 31 August 1998 North Korean launch of a Taepo Dong missile that sailed over Japan. While the program had been unsuccessfully proposed previously, Japanese politicians, surprised by the launch, became amenable to the point of perhaps rushing their decision. This article suggests that what capabilities these satellites render appear to Japanese policy makers to be a secondary concern to the initiation of an autonomous intelligence capability.     

Performance measurement and financial incentives for community behavioral health services provision

This article analyzes the uses of performance measures in contracting for behavioral health services. A flexible performance measurement methodology, called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA),is used to measure cost efficiency and cost effectiveness. The use of measures in controlling costs, allocating program funds and administrating performance-based contracting is demonstated.     

The Poverty of Statistics and the Statistics of Poverty

This paper offers a critique of the picture of world growth and world inequality generally disseminated by international agencies. The positive view commonly presented depends on the widespread consensus that economic performance should be measured using ‘Purchasing Power Parity’ (PPP) statistics, instead of market exchange rates. Although originally conceived narrowly as a basis for comparing living standards, PPP indicators are now indiscriminately promoted as an unexceptionable standard for comparing and aggregating national income statistics. This article highlights the flaws in the PPP approach by accepting the claims made on their behalf at face value. It shows that, even on the basis of these claims, the wrong conclusions have been drawn. By comparing PPP and market exchange rate measures of inequality it shows that what really took place, at the end of the last century, was a systematic reduction in the prices of consumption goods in the Third World. PPP statistics have concealed this underlying and unsustainable trend, allowing it to be packaged as a stable reduction in poverty. Neither genuine growth, nor lasting poverty reduction was achieved over this period. The fall in the price of consumer goods masked a systematic failure to overcome the central problem of development—the high price of capital goods, which PPP statistics understate, and of intermediate goods, which they completely omit.     

The US presidential election of 1992 and its impact on Asia

Andrew Mack, (ed.), Asian Flashpoint: Security and the Korean Peninsula (Canberra and St. Leonards: ANU and Allen and Unwin, 1993), 175 pp.

Toh Mun Heng and Linda Low, (eds.), Regional Cooperation and Growth Triangles in ASEAN (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993), 256 pp.

Kent E. Calder, Strategic Capitalism: Private Business and Public Purpose in Japanese Industrial Finance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 373 pp.

Garry Rodan, (ed.), Singapore Changes Guard: Social, Political and Economic Directions in the 1990s (Melbourne, Australia: Longman Cheshire Pty Limited and New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1993), xxii + 209 pp.

J. Mark Ramseyer and Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Japan's Political Marketplace, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) 262 pp.

Roger Goodman and Kirsten Refsing, (ed.), Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan (Routledge: London, 1992) 243 pp.

John Bresnan, Managing Indonesia: The Modern Political Economy (New York, Columbia University Press, 1993), 375 pp.     

Introduction: Communication and Civic Engagement in Comparative Perspective

The present era is defined by sweeping changes in economies, social institutions, political party systems, and communication processes in many nations. These changes go by various names from globalization to poststructuralism. The impact of these tectonic shifts in the political foundations of nations is greatly debated. In particular, considerable uncertainty surrounds the effects of various changes on the importance of politics for individual citizens and for the kinds of civic activities that people engage in and even regard as political. This is an important time for communication scholars to develop comparative frameworks that bring conceptions of social change together with how people located in various cultural, demographic, and audience groups define their relations to government and, more broadly, to civil society. At stake is our understanding of the role of communication in shaping these political relations, and in shaping the attitudes of citizens about politics, government, and society itself.